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Could you give me an example or two so I can better understand what you mean? You're not entirely wrong, an undocumented plaintext protocol is functionally not
by throwaway3neu94 6y ago
Could you give me an example or two so I can better understand what you mean?
You're not entirely wrong, an undocumented plaintext protocol is functionally not much different from encryption.
However, those which are legitimate (ie, just undocumented, not intentionally encrypted/obfuscated) don't tend to cause problems as only one or few ham devs would be using them. They can only get widespread adoption by other hams if they are documented. So this regulates itself.
A corporation, on the other hand, is not like some ham dev coming up with their own protocol. They can design their own protocol, and then roll it out on thousands (or much more) of transmitters. So just one corporation can cause quite a big problem, with zero public documentation.
The laws as they are, together with direction finding skills, are the communities only (legal) tool to defend against that.
That does not mean hams don't see the value in encryption. I do! But it's a trade-off, and I think this is the only way it can work. The legal change I would like to see is explicitly allowing cryptographic signatures. Right now it's a grey area (likely legal, but not court tested)
- 177tcca 6y agoGreat points, especially, > They can only get widespread adoption by other hams if they are documented. > So this regulates itself Until the first project gets traction that allows you to easily drop in public/private key encryption of payload.
- throwaway3neu94 6y agoI'm not sure what asymmetric encryption has to do with this. There are already protocols that are widely used in ham radio that support encryption. For example, DMR supports encryption (because DMR can also operate in commercial bands, under different laws), it's just not used for ham radio and I've never seen a ham turn it on. Wifi supports encryption, and ham radio operators using it in ham radio bands (with more power) actually turn encryption on but document the PSK publicly (in an attempt to keep the non hams out, but make the encryption more an encoding that anyone could decode). In my experience, ham radio operators generally roughly follow the rules.
- n0ot 6y agoIs this explicitly allowed? I've always thought it would be cool if amateurs were allowed to encrypt their communications, so long as they provided the decryption keys regularly over the same channel. You could incorporate cryptographic signatures, diffie-helmann key exchanges, all kinds of fun stuff, and so long as you periodically transmit the decryption key, you're not hiding anything. I'm not sure what the legality of this is.
- throwaway3neu94 6y agoIt's thought to be legal but it is not explicitly allowed, and so it requires some legal interpretation and that is not court tested.